#4 - The Silence

I remember. I remember when my mother was allowed to love me. That was when I could bear to be touched. I hadn’t yet been tortured into unbearable, dangerous sensitivity. The whip Father used on me was wide so it would not mark me. It turned my back into a reddened, swollen fire of ‘don’t touch me’. It was to toughen me up. I was too soft. I loved. Until I broke and hardened into the image Father wanted. When I could torture my own brothers, when I could torture Kinourae, without leaving marks, except on their souls. When I could remember… her… without tears.

Kinourae loved me even after.  Even after that hideous day.  He loved me.  He still loves me, but he is my body servant.  His family fell into debt and they sold themselves into servitude at the House of Gold, generations ago.  Three generations? Four? He is by nature loving and caring.  Why should I laud him for expressing his nature despite all that my father and I could do to him?  He’s…like a healer that way.  Like Imaryans.  I could have killed him, but I couldn’t make him hate me.

I miss him.

Ahrimaz snapped awake, naked on the bed, rolled onto the stone and began pounding his fists against the floor.  “No, no, no!  Scorching God, KILL ME!  Just KILL ME!  Don’t torture me like this! Hell and flaming damnation!  Don’t do this to me!  KILL ME, it would be a mercy!”  He shouted until his throat was raw and his voice a whisper, his hands raw and bloody. He pulled his clothing off and lay naked on the floor in the smears of his own blood.  “I can’t.  I am too weak.  I am not strong any longer.  I’m broken.  Just kill me.”

There was no servant to come fetch his clothing.  The guard was just opening the door.  Ahrimaz rolled onto his back, watching.  Any contact was suddenly precious.  The woman… a woman as a guard, though she looked tough as his old combat instructor, with seamed and grim face. Moving quietly despite the armour she pointed at him, then at the water in the basin, then at the pass-through.  Clear enough.  He made a kissing noise and thrust a rude finger in the air at her, the blood on his hands already drying and crackling.

She turned without acknowledgement and left again.  Also clear.  It was a meal time.  He could smell the food, outside. A Cylak curry.  His stomach rumbled.  He had to clean up after himself or they wouldn’t feed him.  Fuck them.

He threw his arm over his face and tried to go back to sleep.

**

They didn’t stint him water. Every time they came in they pointed at the mess he’d made, then at him and then at the pass through. He stared at them until they left him alone.  It was a nightmare of his father, starving him into submission that had him finally sighing, getting up and using the blasted chamber pot.  Did they not have plumbing in this benighted world?

He wiped the nightmare sweat off himself with the old towel, bundled everything into the shirt and set it all dirty water, flask, bowl, laundry, in the pass through. Put the lid on the stinking chamber pot and put it in its own pass through… you’d think with so many holes in a cage he’d be able to wiggle some way out of it.  But every door between him and out, had a lock and a guard. And every guard had the stinking Imaryan knock out drug on a cloth ready to clamp over his nose and mouth should he get that far.

He could kill a dozen but someone would clamp it over his face while he was busy breaking someone else’s neck.  Why were they so careful of his life and his health?  They’d interrogated him, making it clear they knew he wasn’t their beloved.  But they’d explained nothing, really.

The guard actually looked surprised when she came in.  Took out the mess, Came back, took out the chamber pot and then, to his startlement, brought breakfast.  He would have punished any prisoner he kept with another day’s fast.  They were all soft.  Not an Empire at all.

He folded the journal closed where it had sat open since he’d stopped writing, set the tray down and folded open his napkin.  There was a pitcher of malak and cream, steaming hot and invigorating.  A gigantic egg like he’d never seen before, even as Emperor, fried, with green onions and peasant rye toast to dip into the orangey soft yolk.  He found he loved it. The glass of berry juice tasted like sunlight and he closed his eyes as he forced himself to eat slowly, rather than wolfing down the food.